Optimizing the technological and informational relationship of the health care process and of the communication between physician and patient--factors that have an impact on the process of diagnosis from the physician's and the patient's perspectives.

OBJECTIVE

The optimization of a diagnosis process and fluency in the Health Care sector in Romania. A key to discover this complex process was to determine a correlation between the physicians and the use of information technology, on one side and the patients' perspective on the other.

HYPOTHESIS

Integrating information technology in a physician's activity will lead to lower costs and less time spent while diagnosing patients. Using the electronic medical records and introducing a unified database with the patients' medical histories will make the process of diagnosis easier.

METHODS

We studied the diagnosis from the point of view of 304 patients in a public hospital and 320 physicians working there.

RESULTS

We believed that time and accessibility to different physicians makes the diagnosis process a burden for a patient and implicitly lead to dissatisfaction with health care services. We supposed that the burden of diagnosis for physicians comes from the lack of Internet connection and computer usage knowledge. We have found out that most physicians know how to use the computer at an intermediate level and have access to Internet, online journals and databases and do not use emails to a higher extent to communicate to other specialists, but do not rely entirely on the electronic medical records. Most physicians think that it is not technology, which stands in the way of proper and fast diagnosis but the financing and the paper work from the Romanian health system. Solutions that might be taken into account to entirely motivate physicians to use electronic medical records are: 1. Adjustments can be made to the computer software interface in order to make the design more consistent (to eliminate the paper forms) and user friendly. 2. Physicians can be provided with more training and knowledge.

DISCUSSION

After some statistical tests have been applied to find a correlation between the chosen variables, we have reached the conclusion that the results are encouraging and there is no correlation between the degree of the impact of Preventive Medicine and the healthy behavior of the respondents.